John Kelly intervened to reiterate the program’s importance to the president. He asked House Speaker Paul Ryan to give Trump a thirty-minute primer on the difference between surveilling Americans with a judge-approved warrant and spying on foreigners. Kelly and Marc Short, the White House legislative affairs director, then huddled with lawmakers on Capitol Hill who were in a state of disbelief over the president’s out-of-left-field tweet, trying to calm them down and round up votes.
Tom Bossert, the White House’s homeland security and cybersecurity adviser, was traveling that morning but received an emergency call from the White House asking him to draft a cleanup tweet that the president could send immediately to reverse his position on renewing Section 702. Meanwhile, lawmakers were speaking out against Trump’s position with opprobrium for his clear lack of knowledge.
“This is irresponsible, untrue, and frankly it endangers our national security,” the Democratic senator Mark Warner tweeted. “FISA is something the President should have known about long before he turned on Fox this morning.”
The White House’s task to shore up votes for renewing Section 702 was further compounded by the opposition to it from two Republican lawmakers who were close to the president. Senator Rand Paul, a libertarian-minded Republican, called Trump the morning of January 11 to raise concerns that surveilling foreign targets could capture information on U.S. citizens. Paul said he would filibuster the bill if it reached the Senate because of his privacy concerns. Congressman Mark Meadows, who led the conservative House Freedom Caucus and was one of Trump’s most faithful defenders, also called the president that morning to reiterate his opposition to the program because of concerns about civil liberties.
When a CNN reporter caught up with Kelly in the halls of Congress to ask if Trump’s behavior made legislating more difficult, the chief of staff said, “It’s not more difficult. It’s a juggling act.” Meanwhile, Kelly hurried to clean up the mess, arranging for FBI director Christopher Wray and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats to explain to Trump how the Section 702 program worked and its value in keeping Americans safe. Throughout the tutorial, Trump never acknowledged making a mistake, never expressed any regret about wasting his staff’s time and imperiling his administration’s own legislative agenda.
“He’s incapable of saying sorry,” said one senior government official.
Trump finally tweeted a correction at 9:14 a.m., using language recommended by Bossert, as a reply to his original tweet, as if he were merely continuing the same thought.
“With that being said,” Trump’s message read, “I have personally directed the fix to the unmasking process since taking office and today’s vote is about foreign surveillance of foreign bad guys on foreign land. We need it! Get smart!”
The tweet was as much an explanation of the policy for Trump himself as for anybody else. House Republicans were meeting at that very moment, alarmed by Trump’s initial tweet, and their anxiety did not subside until Trump’s second tweet registered. Later that day, the House voted overwhelmingly to reauthorize the foreign surveillance program, 256 to 164, and the Senate immediately took up debate on the measure. Crisis averted. Yet the president’s misstep continued to reverberate.
At her afternoon briefing on January 11, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders struggled to explain Trump’s tweets, insisting there was no discrepancy, and said any confusion over the president’s position on the policy was with the media. “The president fully supports the 702 and was happy to see that it passed the House today,” she said. “We don’t see any contradiction or confusion in that.”
When the NBC News correspondent Hallie Jackson asked about Trump’s contradictions, Sanders snapped. “I think that the premise of your question is completely ridiculous and shows the lack of knowledge that you have on this process.”
Privately, however, Trump’s top advisers were exasperated by a crisis they believed would likely recur, considering how much value this president placed in cable news musings and how little value he placed in the expertise of his own government. Some of Trump’s aides felt pity for him, too. He was so obsessed with the belief that the “Deep State” was trying to undermine his presidency by spying on his campaign adviser that the simple acronym “FISA” was like a red flag waved at a bull.
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Also on January 11, Trump met in the Oval Office about immigration policy with a group of lawmakers, including the Democratic senator Dick Durbin, the Republican senators Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton, and the Republican congressman Bob Goodlatte. As the group discussed a possible bipartisan immigration deal that would protect migrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries, Trump grew frustrated.
“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” the president asked. He specifically denigrated Haiti, an impoverished Caribbean nation made up mostly of descendants of African slaves, and said the United States should instead allow migrants from Norway, a Nordic country that is one of the world’s whitest and wealthiest, and other countries.
Trump’s comment in the closed-door meeting, which was first reported by The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey, triggered a days-long backlash. White House officials knew Trump had used the vulgarity and did not try to deny the story. The next morning, on January 12, Durbin told reporters that he had personally heard Trump say “things that were hate-filled, vile and racist.”
But Trump later denied what his aides would not, tweeting that his language had been “tough, but this was not the language used.”
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The night of January 19, sitting in an oversized chair in the White House residence, Trump plotted aloud on the phone with Kelly late into the evening. His voice had a self-assured confidence. Trump believed he had finally found the silver bullet to snuff out the Mueller investigation.
“This can end the investigation into us,” Trump told Kelly. “This is our opportunity to fire Rod. . . . And then it’s over.”
The president sounded pleased, pumped even. “Rod” was Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general and the man empowered to restrain Mueller. Trump’s excitement stemmed from a secret Republican memo that Meadows and other conservative allies in the House had been whispering to him about. They said if they could get permission from the Justice Department to release the memo to the public, the document would undermine Rosenstein by showing his early role in approving questionable surveillance and prove that the Mueller investigation was tainted.
Devin Nunes, who chaired the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, had authored the four-page memo with a key staffer, Kashyap Patel, based on classified documents from the FBI investigation of Trump’s campaign. Hailed as a hero by pro-Trump conservatives and dismissed as a reckless conspiracy theorist by some in the FBI, Nunes claimed in the memo that the bureau had abused its top secret surveillance powers and misled a federal judge in order to launch the Trump investigation in the first place. The memo alleged that the FBI used information from the former British spy Christopher Steele to obtain a warrant to conduct surveillance on Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser. Nunes insisted the FBI failed to alert the court to Steele’s anti-Trump agenda. For weeks now, Nunes had been sparring with top Justice Department officials over releasing the memo. He and Rosenstein had had a cordial, at times even friendly relationship, but the congressman’s obsession with alleged malfeasance in the Russia investigation drove a wedge between them.